I have been studying the images off and on for a couple of years now and I have come up with some ideas. I think it is a religious medical manual; from conception to the afterlife. I think the stars are souls. I think the Cosmology Section that starts at Image # 121 is a representation of Heaven for souls before they are born.
I think it has to do with the Zodiac and the time of conception and/or birth. I think it is using both the phase of the Moon as well as the time of the year by the Sun. I think all those stars are souls that are waiting to be born.
Starting with Image # 135 it is talking about conception and pregnancy and about how the soul enters the mother's body.
In the upper right of Image # 138 is a man casting out seeds – a symbol of fertility.
Go to Ensoulment, Ancient_Greeks on Wikipedia and you will see the steps the soul goes through. Image # 138 shows these steps; vegetable, then animal and only later becoming human. The nymph images on the left are showing these steps. The top nymph is holding a plant. The next a bird. The third transforms into human.
Image # 144 is a warning that pregnancy is only for within holy marriage. The top nymph is holding a cross. The next is holding a wedding ring. The demons at the bottom are a warning that a man should not waste his seed outside of procreation in marriage.
Image # 149 shows the star-soul leaving Heaven and entering the mother's body. Again a nymph at the bottom is holding a wedding ring.
I think starting at Image # 156 shows the path from birth, through life (the Sun) and then to death (the Moon) and then to the afterlife.
I think Image # 158 is a map of the levels of Heaven.
Paradiso, the third and final part of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, is thought to have been written in the early 14th century in Ravenna, Italy. Dante's Paradiso has the following as the 9 Spheres of Heaven:
First Sphere (The Moon)
Second Sphere (Mercury)
Third Sphere (Venus)
Fourth Sphere (The Sun)
Fifth Sphere (Mars)
Sixth Sphere (Jupiter)
Seventh Sphere (Saturn)
Eighth Sphere (Fixed Stars)
Ninth Sphere (Primum Mobile)
I do not know where Dante got the idea that Heaven has 9 Spheres. If Dante's 9 Spheres of Heaven do line up with the 9 circles on Image # 158, I have no idea which is which.
Erni Lillie presented this idea back in 2004. He also had the idea that the stars in the Voynich Manuscript are souls but I don't agree with Erni Lillie that the Voynich Manuscript is an illustration of Dante's Divine Comedy but I am thinking that both got the idea of Heaven having 9 levels from the same (currently unknown) 3rd source. Beyond the idea of Heaven having 9 levels, I don't see a connection between the two works other than they were both from early 14th/15th century Italy.
I think La Divina Comedia by Dante Alighieri is a reinterpretation of the book of Enoch.
And here is a crazy idea that can mesh well with what you are saying, maybe the VM is one of the 366 books Enoch wrote when he was with God and was told to bring these to his kids and to all nations... maybe this is one of the books and the rest of the books are at the Vatican locked up for nobody to see..
If you read / audio listen to the 2nd book of Enoch, God speaks to him about the visible and the invisible. I think this book is made up of both..
What do you think of this idea?
I suppose it is possible, and until the text is deciphered we will never be sure what it is saying, but other than multiple levels of Heaven, I don't see a connection between 2 Enoch and the Voynich Manuscript. Was there some specific verse in 2 Enoch that you had in mind that I missed?
At the time the Voynich Manuscript was created it took a lot of time and resources to create any manuscript. As I understand it, the current thought is that there were five different scribes who wrote the Voynich Manuscript. A scribe may or may not be the author. Knowing there were five different scribes doesn't tell us how many authors there were.
But it seems there were at least five people, probably all men, who were involved with the creation of the Voynich Manuscript and that isn't counting artists who drew the illustrations. I don't know if there is a consensus on how many artists there were. These five or more people could have been working for some wealthy noble or wealthy merchant but the Catholic Church was very rich in Italy during the early 15th century and commissioned lots of works. I think there is a good chance that the people who created the Voynich Manuscript were a part of the Catholic Church or working for the Catholic Church.
I'm not a biblical scholar but as I understand it, 2 Enoch is not considered to be canonical scripture. I think it is unlikely that so much work would have been put into a manuscript that was not canon.
I think the Voynich Manuscript is the traditional policy of the Catholic Church that men and women should respect the sanctity of marriage and procreation. Echoes of Monty Python. You know the song I am talking about.
I think they were attempting to give a medical explanation of how souls came to be in babies inside their mothers following the union of a man and woman that resulted in conception and then eventually that soul returned to Heaven after life on Earth.
The microscope wasn't invented until around 1590 but the people of the early 14th century knew enough about biology to know that the man made a contribution to the creation of a pregnancy which then required a new soul to come from Heaven and be in that baby for it to be born here on Earth.
Once you see it, you can't un-see it. If you dare, take another look at Image # 135 and tell me you don't see this as an illustration of a man's contribution to the creation of a pregnancy.
Maybe the text was written in some kind of code because it is such a delicate topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
It has been reported that, in September 2017, Nicholas Gibbs claimed that the Voynich Manuscript was a health guide for women. A web search will likely reveal several reports.
I don't think he was entirely wrong. I think the Voynich Manuscript is about pregnancy but not from the point of view of the health of the woman. I think the Voynich Manuscript was written by men for men and that they saw the woman only as the incubator to get the soul from Heaven into a living body on Earth.
The connection between the Zodiac and pregnancy is clear. Even today some people read their daily horoscope according to their Zodiac sign which is based on their date of birth.
I know it has been suggested that the Voynich Manuscript was written in code to hide some secret message. It has also been suggested that it was written in a natural language that is now extinct. I now lean towards this second idea. From my interpretations of the illustrations, I see no great mysterious information. In general, it looks like the same kind of astrology and religious information that has been repeated many times over many years.
The Voynich Manuscript seems to have been created by experienced scribes. To me, it does not seem to be a "one-off". Possibly they were copying some earlier manuscript or documents. I think it may be the only surviving example of a now extinct language. Of course that brings up the question of why the language went extinct. Was it a natural extinction or was it intentionally eradicated by a competing group?
Religious groups are often very adamant in insisting that their particular interpretation of religious teachings are the one and only correct variety. Possibly the beliefs of the people who created the Voynich Manuscript differed in some way that a competing group thought was important. Maybe this hypothetical competing group intentionally destroyed all works that they considered heretical. Possibly the existing Voynich Manuscript is the only surviving example because it was carried far from it's place of origin before this hypothetical great purge of all the teachings of its kind.
My current thoughts on Quire 9.
f67r1_f67r2 - Two circles, each with 12 divisions. Are these the 12 months of the year? Are these the 12 signs of the Zodiac?
f67v2_f67v1 - Two more circles. The first has 4 divisions. It seems to have something to do with the sun and the moon. Possibly the four phases of the moon each lunar cycle? Possibly the four season of the year?
The second circle has what looks like a representation of the sun and has 17 divisions. That is a mystery. But only 12 of the divisions have labels; six at the top and six at the bottom. The divisions have different numbers of star-souls and some of them are colored green. Is this some kind of sorting of the pre-born souls according to some kind of characteristic or measurement?
f68r1_f68r2_f68r3 - Three pages in the fold-out. The first two pages don't have large circles but they each have two small circles with faces. I can't tell if these faces are male or female. Also, many of the star-souls have labels. A wild guess here; are the pre-born star-souls being assigned to a mother and father?
The third page is still a mystery to me but there is a sort of curvy line from a group of small stars to the center face. I'm wondering if this is to say something about the person that the star-soul is to become in life.
f68v3_f68v2_f68v1 - Three more circles. I haven't totally convinced myself of this idea but I'm still tossing around the idea of three classes of people; nobles, commoners, and clergy. I'm going with the idea that the people who created the Voynich Manuscript believed that God knew from before the moment of conception, what each person's future station in life would be. That means that the pre-born souls in Heaven would already be classified into the three classes of people; nobles, commoners, and clergy.
To me, the fold-out page f68v3_f68v2_f68v1 seems to show the same three classes as seen on the Rosettes page.
The page on the left seems to have the T-O Map which may represent the nobility.
The center page seems to have a flower which may represent agriculture or farming or the common people.
The page on the right has what I think of as a pinwheel. I think it may represent the clergy.
Going back to f68r1_f68r2_f68r3 , only two pages would been needed for the types of parents because parents are either nobles or commoners. Clergy are not parents.
Quire 10
I have reviewed the pages of Quire 10 and my current best guess is that the first four pages are illustrations of Gestation.
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Each of the first four pages has a circle. Each of the first three pages has one star-soul in the middle.
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This indicates that the star-soul is no longer in Heaven with the other star-souls but is now growing it's own body inside the mother's body. The 3rd circle clearly includes water. Even in the early 15th century they would have known that pregnancy involves water.
In the fourth circle the soul has become a person, a baby soon to be born.
After the baby is born, we have the standard Zodiac signs that are still commonly recognized today.
Here is a deep question. When was the decision made on which particular soul was to be sent to Earth to be the child of a particular set of parents? Was everything planned out from the Dawn of Creation? Or was the decision made at the start of the new pregnancy?
Being a scientist means letting go of pet ideas when the evidence doesn't fit. I try to always follow the evidence. Show me the evidence and you will change my mind.